For me the normal difficulty level for this game is brutally hard. I pretty much can't beat the bosses if I don't outlevel them a bit. All throughout the second chapter I had to stay at least 5 levels higher than the bosses. Never could finish the 2nd arena mission, and by the third chapter I was bored of grinding exp, then got stuck fighting the flashback of the MCs mother or whoever the redhead is. The enemies do so much less damage on the easiest difficulty level that it feels like the difficulty for losers, but damn me if I can't beat the game on normal.
I wonder if being able to read the item descriptions would help. Can only really pick accessories based on the stats they boost. But both weapons and accessories have a lot of different effects. Also there seems to be some system to consume the abilities weapons get, at the smith guy, but I'm not sure how it works.
Weapons and accessories matter a lot, going based off stats isn't the best way to go about it because then you are going to miss out on many powerful passives. There are various passives that are like +damage %, +crit rate, + % stats, various resists, Ap recovery on counter, Ap on skill link count, stagger resist and + % damage vs certain species.
To inherit skills you need to level a weapon to lvl5, go to the blacksmith, select the 3rd option.
From there you can select the weapon and then the skill to inherit by using various materials. Once you inherit a skill its a passive that exists for the rest of the play through regardless of what weapon you use. From what I can tell they also stack with the same type.
Ex
+3% damage stacks with +5% damage
Assuming you aren't just stacked on gear and stats, I recommend learning how to counter more vs bosses. Also the game becomes almost trivial if you either get the Advanced arena accessory belt or inherit the stagger resist skill from one of the swords.
Stagger resist is super game changing since you can just facetank a lot of fights. This is the belt/ skill